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– article –

The Flavours of the Indigenous:

Branding Native Food Products in Contemporary Australia

Charlotte Craw

Abstract

This essay investigates the recent incorporation of Australian ‘native’ ingredi-

ents into a range of food products. Examples of the packaging of products con-
taining such ingredients are analysed to provide an overview of ‘native’ food
packaging, demonstrating the semiotic diversity of ideas of ‘indigeneity’ in this
context. The essay then explores how these multiple inflections relate to wider
discourses of racialised difference in contemporary Australia, focusing on how
discussions of ‘natural’ phenomena reflect confusion over who can be said to
‘properly’ belong to a place – a question that involves such urgent concerns for
postcolonial societies as the (il)legitimacy of settler claims to land ownership.
Much analysis of contemporary racisms positions them as articulating cultural
rather than biological differences. Understandings of difference nonetheless
continue to be inscribed with reference to particular bodies. ‘Native’ foods are
a potent site for investigating such processes: food is often presented as a key
site of cross-cultural exchange and interaction, but despite this cultural inflec-
tion, ‘native’ foodstuffs are often marketed as ‘natural’. This constitutes a cru-
cial difference between native foodstuffs and the extensive range of products
branded through references to ‘exotic’ ethnicities. Exploring the entanglement
of multiple narratives used to position native food products, this essay reveals
how the realm of ecology, conceived of as ‘natural’ and therefore exterior to
politics, is used as a forum for very political questions of ‘belonging’.

introduction

The past three decades have seen the emergence and popularisation of food in-
gredients sourced from flora and fauna billed as ‘native’1 to the Australian con-
tinent (Ripe 1996: 216–23). An increasing range of products, restaurant dishes
and home-cooked meals feature ingredients such as lemon myrtle, mountain
pepper and bush tomatoes (for some indication of the extent of native food

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production and the products involved, see Foster et al 2005; Rural Industries
Research and Development Corporation 2008: 5–7). Many of these foods have
been, and continue to be, eaten by Aboriginal peoples (Bruneteau 1996; Dyson
2006), but as this article discusses, this is not their only association. How is
the idea of the native framed in the commodification of these foods? Why
might indigeneity be a desirable aspect of a product’s branding? This essay
investigates these concerns using examples of the packaging of commercial
native food products.

Native Australian plants and animals were recognised as valuable food items
by the first British settlers – mentioned by Arthur Phillip in his first dis-
patch as governor of the new colony, they continued to feature in cookbooks
throughout the colonial era (Bannerman 2006: 19). The focus of economic
agricultural ventures in the colony was, however, on the ‘improvement’ of
Australia through the acclimatisation of European crops and herds (Gascoigne
and Curthoys 2002). There has been isolated and intermittent commercial
interest in Australian flora and fauna throughout the two hundred years of
British occupation,2 most notably of macadamia nuts (Stephenson 2005), but
it was only in the 1980s that commercial exploitation of a wider range of flora
and fauna began (Ripe 1996: 216–23). Many Australians today have become
familiar with the idea of eating native Australian plants and animals through
the popular television series Bush Tucker Man (filmed in the late1980s and
1990s), starring retired Army Major Les Hiddins, which introduced such foods
within the firmly survivalist ethos that had dominated discussions of native
food resources for much of the twentieth century (Instone 2006; Bannerman
2006: 21–23). Though the beginnings of the present wave of commercialisa-
tion of native foods were concurrent with Bush Tucker Man, they represent a
break from this framing. Instead of survival, the emphasis of contemporary
native food eating is on the gastronomic characteristics and ‘gourmet’ quality
of such ingredients (Hayes 2006), as well as on their environmental and health
benefits (see for instance the discussion of kangaroo in Ripe 1996: 211–15). This
newly invigorated attention to the culinary delights of local Indigenous foods
is not confined to Australia. Similar interest is also evident in other former
British colonies such as Canada, the United States of America and Aotearoa
New Zealand.3 My focus is on how these foods are presented in the Australian
context, but readers familiar with other postcolonial cuisines will find some
resonance between those and the examples I discuss here.

This interest has not escaped academic attention. To date, studies have consid-
ered sites in which these foods are discursively framed (Probyn 2000) – such as
cookbooks (Bannerman 2006) and television series (Instone 2006) – but there

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has been no sustained examination of their presentation as branded commodi-

ties.4 There has also been a tendency to discuss native foods as discrete entities,
rather than examining how the coherency of this concept is created. The recent
interest in Australian native foods covers a wide range of ingredients available
in a wide range of products, from breakfast cereals to preserved rosella (native
hibiscus) flowers to witjuti grub infused liquor. Many of these ingredients have
not been made commercially available prior to this current wave of interest.
What strategies are used to differentiate a group of products as native in an
era understood to be post-racist and post-colonial? In such a setting, how
does the native – previously reviled as ‘primitive’ – become a source of value
and even an effective branding strategy? And what kind of relationships to
place and people are native food products imagined to have? Such questions
call for a critical investigation of the specific construction and deployment of
indigeneity within the commodity culture of native foods, and the manner in
which the material relationships between plants, animals, peoples and places
are used to authenticate notions of difference within this culture.

The category ‘Australian native food’ is by no means as stable as it first seems.

In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida suggests the useful term ‘ontopology’ to
name the ways of thinking that assert an indisputable relationship between be-
ing and place. The term neatly encapsulates what might be termed a discourse
of origins, ‘an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-
being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a
locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.’ (Derrida 1994
[1993]: 82). Cultural geographer Noel Castree draws on Derrida’s suggestion
to point out that naming the socio-spatial locations from which commodities
appear to come is difficult without essentialising places, cultures and localities
(Castree 2001: 1520). It is this kind of relationship that is being named when
one uses a term such as ‘Australian native’. Discussions surrounding Australian
native foods are, I argue, ontopological: they commonly assert that Indigenous
foods have a special relationship to Australia’s natural environment, which is
presented as their real origin. While this may seem self-evident, in the complex
situation of the postcolonial negotiation of national boundaries and belong-
ings, the project of taxonomic classification is a fraught one. Though science
and its observations of the natural world are often understood as objective and
neutral, the scientific labelling of ‘native’ types is a deeply political practice
(Helmreich 2005). This is not however to discredit entirely the notion of place-
bounded identities: my reservation with Derrida’s argument is his avocation of
a global cosmopolitanism as an ethical alternative to nationalist essentialism.
Delimiting the debate to a struggle between these two poles renders invisible
the subaltern struggles of people excluded from both national and global rep-

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resentation (Spivak 1995), as well as the possibility of connections to place that

exceed these frameworks. The critique of ontopology is thus inadequate as an
approach to the negotiation of relationships to place within Indigenous epis-
temologies (for discussion of tensions and cohesion between local knowledges
and cosmopolitanism, see Butt et al 2008). Despite these concerns, Derrida’s
intervention remains an effective way of addressing the reification of place
identities and the positioning of the native in the marketing narratives that
this essay critiques.

Much analysis of contemporary racism positions it as operating through the

articulation of cultural rather than biological differences – what Etienne Bali-
bar terms ‘racism without race’ (Balibar 1991: 23). Part of my argument here is
that biological notions of race do, in fact, persist in contemporary discourses
of indigeneity. Native foods are a site in which debates over belonging become
entangled with discussions of the natural world. Depictions of flora and fauna
serve as a forum for the articulation of contemporary fears about national
boundaries and racialised identities. Jean and John Comaroff (2001) usefully
investigate what they term the ‘ecology of nationhood’ in South Africa. They
examine fears about ‘foreign’ species threatening native eco-systems, argu-
ing that the ‘fynbos [ plant] has come to stand for a ‘traditional’ heritage of
national, natural rootedness’ that is threatened by ‘alien’ invaders (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2001: 244; compare Lattas 1997). This enables ‘a new, postracist
form of racism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 257) which, unlike Balibar’s
version (1991), maintains a basis in biological difference. Anxieties over citi-
zenship and national belonging infiltrate the discourses of ecological protec-
tionism and are projected onto the floral kingdom (Cerwonka 2004; Peretti
1998). There, such questions can be resolved through references to scientific
discourses understood as objective, rather than being debated as critically
and thoroughly political issues. These diversions are particularly charged in
light of contemporary efforts to afford proper recognition and recompense
to Indigenous peoples for the devastation caused by the colonial process. In
these postcolonial settings, the line between ‘exotic’ and native is indeed a
‘difference that matters’ (Helmreich 2005; Morton and Smith 1999).5 Native
food packaging is another site in which this difference is constructed, and its
exploration points further to the implications of understandings of natural
phenomena for political life.

These difficulties of discussing the native are compounded in the context of

commodity cultures. The ontopological assertion of a connection to place, Der-
rida (1994 [1993]) suggests, is a statement regarding ontological value. In the
case of native food products, it is also a statement of economic value. Work in

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cultural geography has critiqued the ways in which ‘geographical knowledges’

about food are constructed and the role that these play in creating an ethically
charged understanding of the agro-economic system (Cook and Crang 1996).
Michael Pollan terms these tales ‘supermarket narratives’ (Pollan 2001: 11; see
also Hollander 2003), a phrase that neatly encapsulates the manner in which
images and texts on product packets depict idealised representations of the
source of food ingredients. Statements and images that cast food products as
originating from a particular place are a means of differentiating commodities
– a fetishisation of production that elides the complex trans-local relations in-
volved in the manufacture and distribution of goods (Appadurai 1996: 41–42).
In the Australian context, such geographical knowledges are used to brand and
differentiate Australian native food products. Following Derrida and Appa-
durai, I am concerned with the ways in which ontopological assertions of the
origins of native food ingredients work to authenticate products as ‘genuinely’
Australian while eliding the complexities involved in such territorialisation.

Some supermarket narratives locate the origin of products not within places
but in peoples and cultures. In her book Strange Encounters, feminist philoso-
pher Sara Ahmed suggests the term ‘stranger fetishism’ to name the mech-
anisms by which the native comes to be a means of value creation within
commodity culture. Products are differentiated through the claim that they
originate from the native stranger, thus attaining the status of ‘authentic’ cul-
tural artefacts (Ahmed 2000: 5, 114–15). Such differentiation works to create
value, providing a means of capitalising on what Rey Chow terms ‘the surplus
value of the oppressed’ that results from the positive valuation of hitherto
marginalised cultures (Chow 1993: 30). Aboriginal cultures are depicted in na-
tive food marketing as an instance of such valuation, but there are important
limitations to the recognition afforded by branding that demands an authentic
– i.e. suitably ‘other’ – Aboriginal culinary tradition.

Such cultural branding is also caught up in processes of the naturalisation of

racialised difference similar to those identified by Comaroff and Comaroff
(2001). Caren Kaplan, in her critique of how The Body Shop and other corpora-
tions represent the world’s human population, argues that such contemporary
portrayals are ‘trans/national’: they articulate ‘the world’ as a globalised entity
but retain notions of nation and culture as ‘distinct, innate markers of differ-
ence’. This is particularly evident, she suggests, in the depiction of ‘traditional’,
non-metropolitan industries as native (Kaplan 1995: 49). A similar argument
is made by Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey in their analysis of the
‘renaturalisation of kind and type’ that characterises contemporary images of
the globe (Franklin et al 2000). This is a renaturalisation that, as they explain,

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works as a postracist form of racism. As a response to their considerations of

‘global nature’, I offer an examination of the local and national nature of native
foods. In doing so, I draw on Kaplan’s recognition of the ongoing role that na-
tion and culture play as markers of naturalised difference.

The notion of nativeness and the accompanying versions of national, local

and cultural identities in the marketing of Australian native foods are not
simply contorted depictions of underlying entities and localities but actively
participate in the creation and maintenance of the differences that establish
these identities as discrete and separate places. In other words, the local and
the native are produced as different. This argument extends Ahmed’s (2000)
analysis in a crucial way, by examining how the ‘other’ from which the com-
modity originates need not be human. While the figure of the native human
remains an important part of the marketing of native foods, places and natural
environments can also serve as the stranger from which products are claimed
to originate – in ways that parallel, intersect, and perhaps even inform, under-
standings of human difference.

What then is the valuable difference of native foods? While my research has
revealed a surprisingly wide variety of strategies that are used to differenti-
ate native food commodities, there are some major motifs and themes that
emerge in the marketing of native foods, in particular nature, Indigenous cul-
ture, place and nationhood. In July and August of 2006, I visited ten retail
locations in Melbourne, chosen as a representative cross-section of the various
contexts in which native foods are made available to urban consumers. The
examples discussed here were all sourced during this investigation, except one
that was found in Hobart later in the same year. Although I examine kangaroo
marketing elsewhere (Craw 2008), for clarity I have chosen to focus solely on
plant-based foods in this essay. Together, they give an indication of the most
prevalent strategies used to market native food products in Australia today.
This is not an exhaustive overview, and its categories are not mutually exclu-
sive – both factors that should be taken as further evidence of the malleability
of native foods and the range of discourses that they attract. My argument is
not aimed at installing a new discourse of types, but rather seeks to critique
the contemporary production of difference.

Naturally Native

The most ubiquitous theme in the marketing of native foods is ‘nature’. This
follows a broad trend in contemporary commodity culture, where portraying
foodstuffs as connected to nature is a common branding strategy (Hansen

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2002; Pollan 2006). Such branding repeats and expands upon well-worn cli-
chés, primarily nature’s presentation as an unspoilt realm external to human
society. While this attitude has been heavily critiqued (Grosz 2005; Rose 2003;
Park 2000), it remains a potent and compelling narrative for the presentation
of food’s origins. Native food marketing is one site, amongst many, in which
this binary conception of nature as pure and separate from culture has been
taken up for the purposes of product branding (Goss 1999: 60–63).

Natural food branding asserts a connection between the often heavily proc-
essed product in the packaging and the environment that is purported to have
produced it. The Australian Native Bush Pasta range, produced by Casalare
Specialty Pasta, relies heavily on such a strategy. The range includes various
dried pasta shapes, each flavoured with a different Australian native herb – I
purchased Rivermint Gnocchi. The product is identified prominently as ‘Bush
Pasta’, with an organic certification symbol and a large illustration of a plant on
the packaging. The different aspects featured in the packaging – plant, biome,
and farming methods – work to reinforce the natural origins of the prod-
uct. As Michael Pollan discusses in relation to the branding of organic foods
(Pollan 2006: 134–40), such supermarket narratives purport to show the ag-
ronomic production of ingredients transparently, but often do so in ways that
involve evocative, idealising depictions. In the case of Bush Pasta, it is easy to
assume that the plant depicted on the packet is the herb that is used to flavour
the pasta, but this is a standard image of lemon myrtle rather than rivermint.
Similarly, the ‘bush’ designation smooths over the wide variety of habitats in
which the ingredients in the various varieties of pasta grow – from the Central
Desert to Queensland rainforest.

More crucially, the wheat that makes up the bulk of the product is also not
depicted. Native food products such as Bush Pasta incorporate these native,
natural ingredients as flavourings in products derived largely from other culi-
nary traditions and often made from mostly introduced ingredients. What is
‘bush’ about Bush Pasta is its tiny native component – in the case of Rivermint
Gnocchi, for instance, the ‘uniquely exciting flavours of local native plants’
constitute only 0.4 percent of the ingredients – and the bush here is the source
of natural ingredients, not cultural inspiration. Where, moreover, exactly is
the ‘bush’ from which these plants are sourced? While the packaging describes
the native plant flavourings as ‘local’, it is more insistent on describing them
as ‘Australian-grown’. The native is not simply local, but national, a specific
territorialisation of the native.

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Conspicuously absent from native food marketing is the idea of untamed na-
ture as potentially threatening. While romanticisations of nature as free of
the ills of modern society may dominate at the moment (Short 1991: 6), the
ambivalence of historical attitudes towards nature is retained in some market-
ing discourses (Wilk 2006: 309–10). Narratives of nature as dangerous – and
dangerously exciting – appear in branding: for instance, images of the jungle
as ferocious and chaotic are used to sell products such as men’s cologne (Slater
2004: 172). Such invocations of nature as thrillingly terrifying are rare in na-
tive food marketing. The closest approach to the scarier side of nature that I
found during my fieldwork was Vic Cherikoff ’s ‘Wildfire Spice’ mix. The ‘wild’
appellation is suggestive both of heat – the ‘bit of zing’ promised by the label –
and an uncontrolled fire, though this latter allusion was not reinforced by text
or imagery. The tendency of marketing to position native foods as pure, safe
and scientifically known can be viewed in light of the wider discourses about
native food products, which emphasise the fearsome, or at least unknown,
qualities of native ingredients. Native spices are often described in terms of
their potent flavours and the need to overcome consumer unfamiliarity. For
instance, Stephen Downes, author of Advanced Australian Fare: How Austral-
ian Cooking Became the World’s Best, devotes only a tiny sidenote to native
foods labels, in which he labels mountain pepper as ‘incredibly strong – even
caustic’ in taste (Downes 2002: 273) – a less enthusiastic way of saying it has a
‘bit of zing’. The positive conception of nature in native food marketing, then,
should not be understood as a simple idealisation. Rather, such a conception
plays against the more longstanding denigration of Australian nature as an
empty, unproductive wilderness (Moran 2002; Robin 2007), and in doing so
works to produce the ‘surplus value of the oppressed’.

Narratives of the Nation

Like the South African fauna analysed by Comaroff and Comaroff (2001),
Australian native foods are also co-opted as national symbols. Australian leg-
islation requires packaging to state the country from which the ingredients
have been sourced and indicate where the product has been processed (Food
Standards Australia New Zealand 1987/2007). The majority of native food
producers go well beyond the requirements of the code in their identification
of their products as Australian-grown and -made, building on the scant sug-
gestiveness of Country of Origin labelling to include emphatic connections to
national identity. One of the few items commonly available in supermarkets
(rather than specialist shops and markets) at the time of my survey was the
Dick Smith Australian native foods line, which includes a range of canned
soups and a breakfast cereal. The highly nationalistic packaging of these prod-

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ucts is the company’s standard branding strategy, with its common features of
a prominently placed Australian flag and Dick Smith’s Akruba-clad6 head. In
the case of the native food line, these national references are reinforced by the
packaging’s text: Bush Foods Breakfast, the cereal, features an injunction to
‘discover the flavours of Australia’ on the front and back of the box. A side pan-
el emphasises that the product is made ‘with Australian cereal grains, authentic
Australian rainforest fruit flavours, [and] Aussie wattle seeds’, the products
of ‘the great Australian bush’. Dick Smith’s ‘Australia’ is a particularly virulent
form of the nationalism that is common in the marketing of native Australian
foods. While such zealous patriotism is uncommon, it reflects a more wide-
spread trend within native food packaging, which works to homogenise both
native foods and the continent from which they are sourced. Native foods are
presented as native to Australia as a whole, a presentation that obscures the
complex relationship that each species has to particular environments. While
this is a process of identification, it is also works to differentiate Australia as a
discrete and distinct entity.

Such homogenisation supports a particular conception of national unity. In

the Dick Smith example, added to the insistence on the national origins of
the ingredients is the suggestion that those who consume the product are
also Australian. The blurb from ‘Dick’ reports that the cereal has been made
because he wants ‘to share [bush foods] with all Australians’. Through the use
of inclusive pronouns – these foods are ‘from our rainforests’, ‘showcas[ing]
the abundance of our country’ – the citizen-consumer is interpellated as part
of a national community with territorial rights to the Australian continent.
Andrew Lattas perceptively describes the way in which Indigenous flora and
fauna are presented within the context of (post)colonial settler culture. On his
account, the colonial attack on the environment is presented as the primordial
crime of the nation, ‘a stain which defines the nation’s personality’ (Lattas
1997: 227). In an all-too familiar trope, settler culture is positioned as cultur-
ally deficient and superficially materialistic, alienated from nature and thus
from themselves (Lattas 1997: 232). Lattas clarifies the way in which, having
produced a gap between settler culture and the environment it inhabits and
exploits, discourses of unitary nationalism can be presented as offering the
means of overcoming this ‘lack’. Such a mechanism can be seen in Bush Foods
Breakfast’s promise of a connection to a nationalised nature.

The backdrop to this rampant nationalism is the nature of the ‘genuine Austral-
ian’ ingredients. Behind the logo and text, the main image of the Bush Foods
Breakfast box is a breakfast spread, surrounded by ingredients in their raw
stage and set against a landscape of green hills and fields. What is not depicted

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is just as significant: like Bush Pasta, the cereal consists mostly of ‘exotic’ spe-
cies, none of which are represented in their unprocessed form. The species
identified as ‘Australian’ make up a scant proportion of the product: the cereal
includes 2 percent mangoes, 2 percent macadamias, 1.5 percent honey and a
smattering of ‘Australian bushfood seasonings’. While the packet invites you to
‘discover the flavours of Australia’, the cereal’s substance is introduced staples –
wheat, corn, oats, rice. Indigenous ingredients add spice rather than providing
sustenance, a point that I return to below.

The inclusion of mangoes as a ‘bush food’ is particularly startling, and dem-

onstrates the extent to which neither the ‘Australianness’ nor the naturalness
which this packaging invokes are static nor self-evident. The mangoes are de-
scribed on a side panel as ‘Queensland mangoes’. Coming after a paragraph
describing ‘[t]he great Australian bush [as] full of surprises and new discover-
ies’, this implies that – like the macadamias and wattle seeds – the mangoes are
also ‘truly’ ‘Aussie’. Such an implication conceals the complex, transnational
interactions that continue to impact on Australian ecologies, and particularly
significantly, the ongoing role that human efforts have in both maintaining and
changing natural environments, including the substantial land management
practices of Indigenous Australians before the arrival of British settler-invaders
(see Rose 1996: 9–10). Mangoes have a recent history in Australia, having been
introduced in the late 1800s.7 They are hardly ‘new discoveries’ from ‘the great
Australian bush’. Rather than a category error – a mislabelling of mangoes as
‘Australian’ when they are ‘actually’ ‘exotic’ – this distortion arises from the
imposition of static notions of nature and ‘nation’ onto ecologies which, seen
from other perspectives, exist in states of flux (see, for instance, Marianne
Lien’s (2005) discussion of belonging and the transnational biomigration of
Atlantic salmon in Tasmania).

Such an imposition is not politically neutral. Australia in this conception is a

combination of geo-ecological features – rainforests and their produce – with
cultural signifiers of the nation. Ecology and geopolitics are conflated in a man-
ner that works to naturalise a particular conception of the Australian nation
– one in which the bush and its fruits are available to ‘all Australians’ without
the interference of messy factors such as native title disputes or environmental
degradation. The packaging promises that ‘Bush Foods Breakfast brings the
flavour of the Australian bush into your morning’. Inserting narratives of ‘na-
tion’ and nature into the everyday practices of consumers in this way, Bush
Foods Breakfast offers them a way of understanding not just the ‘Australian’
‘bush’ but also their own relationship to place: eat this, the packaging implies,
and you are making yourself part of this chain of life-forms connected to the

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land. And ‘Dick’ enthusiastically encourages such a reading – taking it even

further to assert that the flavours of the cereal come ‘from our [sic] rainfor-
ests’, turning inhabitation into a declaration of ownership. Eating the cereal
becomes a way of appropriating for oneself the indigeneity of its ingredients
– a way of enacting and simultaneously legitimating one’s occupation of land
(see Instone 2001, who suggests a similar mechanism at work in bush tucker
consumption more generally). This reading is further supported by the strong
cultural connections made between food and identity, evident in the com-
mon aphorism that ‘you are what you eat’ (see Probyn 2000). Through such
nationalising supermarket narratives, the difference of the native becomes
consumable as identity.

Towards the Local

Place is an important part of the marketing of native foods. The appellation

of a ‘local’ origin to a product in Australia is not subject to governmental
regulation. The presentation of foodstuffs as ‘local’, then, is a strategic brand-
ing choice. This is slightly different from the European situation, where geo-
graphical indicators (such as ‘Champagne’) are part of a regulatory framework
that acknowledges the ‘local’ as politically and economically invested (Parrott
et al 2002). In both situations, however, the ‘local’ is associated with a turn
from a heavily industrialised food culture to one more focused on artisanal
production (Pollan 2006; Parrott et al 2002). The recent upsurge in interest in
eating locally often pictures the local as the site of eating practices that are both
ethical and pleasurable (Parkins and Craig 2006; see also Ripe 1996: 183–90
on regional eating in Australia). The local suggests a single origin, and often
a shortened supply chain between producer and consumer, both features that
are desirable as guarantees of quality and safety (Kuznesof et al 1997). Local
branding is, then, another instance of the ontopological valuation of a prod-
uct’s imagined origin.

While the ‘local’ implies specificity, it is a loose concept, encompassing any-

thing from particular farms to vast regions such as the Central Desert. Native
food marketing can be particularly insistent on state identities as a means of
localising a product. One company, Red Kelly’s Gourmet Foods, trades on Tas-
mania’s image as a discrete entity separate from the Australian mainland (this
is a prominent part of the Brand Tasmania strategy, for details see Brand Tas-
mania Council 2007), stressing the Tasmanian character of products such as
its Whole Grain Mustard with Native Tasmanian Lemon Myrtle. The mustard’s
packaging features a map of Tasmania, as well as multiple occurrences of the
place-name, accompanied with the assertion that they are ‘A Proud Tasmanian

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Company’. Only the company’s address admits that they are in Australia. This
branding works in two ways, with the product serving as souvenir or exotica
for purchasers from elsewhere, while also appealing to a vein of Tasmanian
chauvinism. Red Kelly’s links products to place as a way of differentiating their
offerings.

Red Kelly’s insistence on Tasmanianness is not, however, verification of the

provenance of the enclosed foodstuffs. While other Red Kelly’s products con-
tain mountain pepper, which is indigenous to the region, the ‘Native Tasma-
nian’ ingredient in this particular mustard, lemon myrtle, has a distribution
centred on southern Queensland rainforest areas (Hess-Buschmann 2004;
Australian National Botanic Gardens 2003). Its appellation here as a ‘native
Tasmanian’ plant – as it is described even in the ingredient list – seems rather
bold. The resolutely local identity acknowledges the transient human migrant –
the company’s name derives from that of the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly’s
father, an Irishman shipped to Tasmania as a convict who left for Victoria after
his release (Jones 1995) – but the smaller-scaled, more recent intranational mi-
gration of lemon myrtle plants is unremarked. Like the mango in Bush Foods
Breakfast, they are caught up in ideas of the natural history of the nation. The
indigeneity of ingredients is an authenticating source of difference only so long
as they are seen to stay in place. Once again, native foods are the ‘natural’ – the
word is mentioned three times on the packaging – component of a foodstuff
that draws on migrant and settler cultures.

Indigenous Allusions

There are significant issues surrounding the involvement of Aboriginal people

in the native foods industry. While extensive numbers of Aboriginal people
are involved in the collection of raw produce in central Australia, the industry
as a whole is focused on non-Aboriginal horticultural enterprises, particularly
in southern Australia (Davies et al 2008: 60). The industry rests on Aboriginal
traditional knowledge, but this information is unprotected by Australian in-
tellectual property law (Morse 2005: 13), and emergent Aboriginal enterprises
are hampered by resource and skill issues (Davies et al 2008: 61). The Rural
Industries Research and Development Corporation’s Native Foods R&D Pri-
orities and Strategies 2007–2012 report, which sets the agenda for government-
funded research, advocates the recognition of Indigenous contributions to the
industry. However, the plan’s emphasis is on mainstreaming and international-
ising the industry (Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation
2008: 2; see discussion of this point in relation to two earlier R&D plans in
Morse 2005: 14–15), and the association of native foods with Aboriginal culture

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is listed as one of the weaknesses faced by the industry, preventing their billing
‘as new tastes for Australian cuisine’ (Rural Industries Research and Develop-
ment Corporation 2008: 10).

This sidelining of Aboriginal concerns is reflected in the marketing of native

food products, many of which – such as the examples I have already discussed –
are marketed without any acknowledgement of Indigenous cultures or peoples.
Moreover, references to Indigenous culture are not necessarily a guarantee of
Aboriginal involvement. Like the ‘Aboriginal-style’ home wares popular in
the 1950s (Factor 2000), native food marketing often features design elements
that draw on Aboriginal art forms. For instance, the design of Australis Na-
tive tea boxes incorporates a drawing of a kangaroo and a dot and line design.
While both are suggestive of specific Aboriginal painting practices, there is
no attribution of the pictures to a particular artist or group. Without such
acknowledgement, the artworks become signifiers of a generalised ‘Aboriginal
style’ art, affirming a similarly homogenised cultural identity.

Moreover, when Indigenous cultures are mentioned in native food market-

ing it is often in ways that place Aboriginal people in prehistoric time. Invo-
cations of the past are a common branding strategy, alluding to a source of
authenticity that contemporary society is perceived to lack (Lowenthal 1985;
Urry 1995: 218–19). In Australia, it is often Aboriginal peoples who are posi-
tioned as the guardians of a now desirable ‘primitive’ way of life (Attwood
1996:xxvii-xxviii). This positioning pervades much of the explicit reference
to Aboriginal cultures in native food marketing For example, text on the Aus-
tralis Native box claims that ‘Australis Native reflects the spiritual dreamtime
of an ancient continent – Australia. Australia’s rich native plants have been
gathered by Aborigines for thousands of years’. The possibility – and actuality
of Aboriginal involvement, and more crucially, interest and investment, in
present-day gathering and production of these plants is silently sidestepped
here. Instead, the Australis Native packaging repeats a series of timeworn ideas
about Indigenous cultures – ‘ancient’, ‘spiritual’ – all too familiar to critics of
colonialism. Even innocuously numerical phrases such as ‘thousands of years’
can play into colonialist narratives. While at first glance this seems – like the
kangaroo design – just recognition of the strength and value of Aboriginal cul-
ture, such invocations of Aboriginal inhabitation also have the effect of shoring
up the idea of Aboriginal culture as a timeless and static monolith (McNiven
and Russell 2005: 205–8). The homogenised and antiquated Aboriginal culture
depicted in much native food marketing supports the notion of indigeneity as
a discrete and innate marker of difference.

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Two exceptions to such depictions are worth mentioning. Robins Bushfoods

and Reedy Creek Nursery have both been instrumental in establishing um-
brella organizations, Indigenous Australian Foods Ltd and the Outback Pride
Project, respectively, to support Indigenous communities in establishing na-
tive food cultivation enterprises. These organizations link these enterprises to
the wider Australian and international markets. For instance, Robins produce
the Outback Spirit brand of sauces, jams and spices, available in the major
Australian supermarket chain Coles and distributed internationally through
the German spice company Hela; and the Outback Pride cultivators supply
ingredients to Indigenous celebrity chef Mark Olive’s Outback Café, a Lifestyle
Channel programme with a range of tie-in merchandise such as spices.8 In
contrast to Australis Native’s homogenised depictions of Aboriginal culture,
marketing material from these projects presents specific present-day Indig-
enous communities and explicitly connects recognition of Indigenous culture
to financial remuneration.

While these companies are greatly aiding the development of Aboriginal

native food enterprises, their offerings to date do not challenge the general
consumption culture of native food products. Lisa Heldke’s Exotic Appetites
(2003) examines the appeal of ‘food adventuring’ – searching out exotic, eth-
nic cuisines – for privileged white subjects. While much of her analysis of the
appropriation and ‘cultural food colonialism’ that occurs in such practices is
applicable to native food products, it is centred on the exoticisation of cul-
tures and cuisines. In contrast, Indigenous Australian culture appears in native
food marketing as the origin of natural ingredients. Instead of a fully-fledged
Aboriginal cuisine, native ingredients are inserted into a ‘modern Australian’
cuisine that draws on techniques from migrant cultures. The products that I
have discussed are good examples: mustard, tea, cereal, pasta. The image of
Aboriginal cuisine presented by the range of available products excludes what
for some groups constituted staples, for instance, foods such as yams, as well
as the labour-intensive processes required to prepare many native foods.9 In-
stead, the Aboriginal diet is portrayed as fish and meat flavoured with spices,
an image that, inaccuracy aside, conveniently aligns Indigenous eating with
the kind of meals that might be created in customers’ home kitchens. At the
same time, the available range of products elides indigenous eating practices
based on activities that might be understood as closer to contemporary west-
ern agricultural practice – particularly the gardening of tubers and grinding
seeds into flour to make a bread (wattleseed, for instance, has been used as a
staple, not a spice, see Cherikoff 1997 [1989]:43). There are some notable excep-
tions to this: for instance, Vic Cherikoff offers pieces of paperbark that can be
used to cook fish and meat in an Indigenous fashion. By and large, however,

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Indigenous culinary techniques are, like Indigenous agriculture more gener-

ally (Rose 1996; Muecke 2004: 51–2), elided by the contemporary interest in
native foods. While the exoticised others are still considered to have culture,
the primitivised, Indigenous other is ripe for appropriation as nature.

Conclusion

The understandings of place, nation and nature that are mobilised in the mar-
keting of native food products have been critiqued by several decades of aca-
demic work, but they remain, as this article has demonstrated, prominent in
the marketplace. The success of these strategies is difficult to judge, especially
as there is no formal data available on sales (Rural Industries Research and
Development Corporation 2008: 5; Morse 2005: 78). The increasing presence
of native food products on supermarket shelves – two years after my initial
survey, these products continue to be stocked and some ranges, such as Dick
Smith and Outback Spirit have added to their offerings – gives some indication
that the translation of the surplus value of the native into the differentiation of
products has been successful. There is much room to extend this investigation,
which is in many ways preliminary. A critical assessment of the consumer per-
ception of these branding practices could fruitfully examine the link between
everyday consumption practices and the understandings of nature, nation,
and indigeneity that I have discussed. Do consumers also hold the attitudes
to place and Aboriginal peoples that this essay argues are pervasive in the
marketing of native food products? Or are the ways in which consumers think
about – and with – what they eat developing new relationships, perhaps even
ones which challenge these colonial legacies?

Such investigations might also further address the most prevalent aspect of the
differentiation of native food products – their inscription as natural. As the ex-
amples I have discussed demonstrate, an association with Indigenous culture
is not necessary for the establishment of nativeness. The marketing of native
foods reflects and reinforces the notion that indigeneity is a category that exists
outside of the cultural. Thus, the difference of the ‘indigene’ is renaturalised
and ceases to appear as a politically charged and historically situated category.
Neutralised in this way, the native becomes accessible as a marker of a differ-
ence that is both palatable and profitable.

nb: This paper draws on my doctoral research. I am grateful to my supervisors, Denise

Cuthbert and Stephen Pritchard, for their advice and support, and to the anony-
mous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article for their perceptive comments.

55
Article · Craw

Notes

1 Australian native foods are also known as ‘bush tucker’ or ‘bushfoods’. My use
of the term ‘native foods’ follows that of industry and governmental bodies (see,
for instance, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation 2008).
For the purposes of legibility, this will be the sole occurrence of this word – and
cognates such as indigenous – in quotation marks. Their non-appearance after
this point should be understood purely as a service to the reader rather than an
uncritical acceptance of this term.

2 Often this has taken the form of novelty shipments of Australian meat products
overseas. For instance, kangaroo was available in London in the Victorian era
(Lever 1992: 45) and again at the opening of the Safeways International super-
market in Washington DC in 1964 (Lonegren 1995: 220). Witjuti grub soup was
served to customers in California in the mid-1970s (Hickson 1975).

3 For instance, the RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) project, taking
place under the auspices of the American Slow Food organization, undertakes to
catalogue and work towards the preservation of America’s edible native species
(see Slow Food USA n.d.). For discussion of some of the New Zealand framing
of Indigenous foods, see Craw (2006).

4 Soukoulis (1990) makes some general remarks but predates most of the products
available today.

5 The phrase ‘differences that matter’ is drawn from the title of Sara Ahmed’s 1998
book, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism.

6 Named after an Australian hat company, an Akubra is a distinctive style of hat

with a wide brim, which has become an Australian icon, associated particularly
with rural farming and the outback.

7 The popular commercial cultivar, ‘Kensington Pride’, was probably introduced by

participants in the horse trade between Queensland and India. The presence of
mangoes in Australia is thus part of a complex system of interactions involving
inter-species relationships (horses and mangoes) that are manipulated as part
of economic and militarised colonial processes (horses were provided to India
for military use) (Morton 1987).

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8 Details of these projects and their products can be found on their websites: Out-
back Café http://www.theoutbackcafe.com/; Outback Pride http://www.outback-
pride.com.au/; Robins Bushfoods / Outback Spirit http://www.robins.net.au/

9 An overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander food practices can be found
in Dyson 2006; see also Cherikoff 1997 [1989].

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